The new Live Search is here!

Microsoft's latest rendition of Live Search, with enhanced celebrity, health, local, maps, image and video search among others is finally here. Being a sceptic, I wasn't expecting much but to my surprise, I did find a few things that I thought were quite neat. Image search results allows you to control the size and number of images that display in your screen area. Infinite scrolling ensures that all the search results are displayed on one page. And nicest of all, previews are available by rolling over images. Even niftier is video search, which shows shows a preview of the video with rollover. No clicks required! Try it! Search for "Britney Spears" and move your mouse over the search results to see this in action. Live maps is also improved, with a single search box and enhanced in-map searching.

Live search still lags behind Google and Yahoo in internet searches, with Google having over 40% of the market share, Yahoo at around 30% and Live at just 13%. The new Live search is an attempt to change this and time will tell whether users embrace Live's new features over what Google and Yahoo currently offer. The biggest drawback to Live search however is the size of their search index and the rate at which they crawl the web. Google still is the leader here and they will probably dominate for the foreseable future. However, with most search results being irrelevant to most common searches, the features over the size of the search results may prove to be the winning factor. Lets see what the future has in store for Live!